If you're a Chinese journalist, as any reader of this
website understands, working conditions are tough in any year. Publish press
releases and government pronouncements, and you'll probably be fine. Report
critically, and you risk the wrath--and sometimes violence--of local officials
and thugs. You can expect your editors
to be watching censorship guidelines, or
lose their jobs. And if you're a Uighur or Tibetan online journalist
reporting on protests--well, watch out.

But by one unlikely measure, Chinese journalists seem to do
pretty well. When it comes to having impact--shifting policies, changing local
laws, and even provoking the arrests of party-connected criminals--the media in
China have shown their power repeatedly.

The New York Times
on Friday reported one
example of media impact. To paraphrase: After years of insisting officially
that the sky is blue, the government has been pushed to admit that it's
actually gray.

The Times story
focuses on the role of Internet activists in pushing the government to back off
its line that air quality in China is improving. Taking to the microblogs with
their own air quality readings, activists in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and
Wenzhou forced the Chinese government to track--at last--the tiny particulates
(2.5 microns in diameter or less, known as PM 2.5) that are one of the
deadliest forms of air pollution.

But traditional media in China also played a role in voicing
perspectives at odds with the official clean-air story. In December, the
straitlaced, state-owned China Daily
was giving
voice to environmental experts' concerns about PM 2.5 particulates. Around
the same time, the Beijing-based Caixin
was reporting on
Beijing authorities' refusal to disclose this data to a concerned citizen
named Yu Ping. Caixin, for its part, repeated (in English) this quote first
published (in Chinese) by the hard-charging Guangzhou-based tabloid Southern
Metropolis Daily:

"[Environmental Protection Bureau] Deputy Director Du
Shaozhong previously said that he is willing to compare Beijing's PM 2.5
readings to that of the U.S. embassy's," Yu said to Southern Metropolis Daily, "If foreigners can see these
statistics, why not Chinese?"

Surely, it was this combination of online rabble-rousing and
traditional reporting that led the government to change its tune.

Was this a one-off? A paper presented at last year's
American Political Science Association suggests not. (It's behind a pay wall;
you need access to an academic database to read the whole thing.) But in short, political scientists Jonathan Hassid and Jennifer
N. Brass compare what they call "government responsiveness" in China, where the
press is not free, to Kenya, where it is. What they found was surprising. In
one example after another in China, scandals led to public pressure, which led
the government in China to respond. In
Kenya, by contrast, enormous public pressure seemed to fizzle with few results.

And while it wasn't exactly the point of their paper, it was
hard not to notice the huge role that the not-free Chinese press played in
bringing scandals to public attention.

In 2003, Southern
Metropolis Daily's aggressive reporting on the death in custody of a man
named Sun Zhigang led to changes in the national law that authorized detention
of migrants.

In 2007, it was Henan TV that first reported on the brick
factories that were employing kidnapped children as workers--a scandal that led
to the jailing and even execution of "dozens of colluding Shanxi officials," according
to Hassid and Brass.

Southern Weekend
had to fight through months of official censorship in 2008 to publish a report
that the dairy company Sanlu was selling baby formula contaminated with
melamine. When the story finally broke, executives from the company were jailed
and even executed--though the larger problems in food supply seem to remain.

Paradoxically, these examples also illustrate the
excruciatingly high cost of official censorship. Six babies died and another
54,000 were hospitalized because of the contaminated milk. Lives would have
been saved if Southern Weekend
had been allowed to publish its reporting when it initially had the story in
July 2008--which was (not coincidentally) the month before the Olympic Games
were held in Beijing.

In other cases, journalists themselves paid the price for
the impact their work had. After their
excellent reporting on Sun Zhigang, some of the journalists of Southern Metropolis Daily were rewarded with
jail time.

It's clear that the Chinese press is thriving against the
odds. Imagine the impact journalists could have there if the odds weren't quite
so long.

Kristin Jones, a consultant to CPJ's Asia program, is an independent investigative reporter. In 2011, she was part of a team that won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Seeking Justice for Campus Rapes," a collaboration between NPR and the Center for Public Integrity. Jones was CPJ's senior Asia research associate until 2007. She led writing on the CPJ report "Falling Short," which documented press freedom abuses in China ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games.